Sled Island: Pop-rap co-op balances books & BS

Photo courtesy Sounds Like BS. Dan Busheikin and Mike Searle, who together form pop-rap duo Sounds Like BS, are both full-time students at Ryerson University.

At least, that is the professed goal of the guys in pop-rap duo Sounds Like BS, who grew up in Calgary but are currently in the process of taking over the Toronto indie scene, while also studying at Ryerson University.
“You kind of have to have that mindset, like ‘We are the shit,’ or else people won’t take you seriously,” says Searle. “I think it would be hilarious if people were talking about us all across Canada, or even around the world — we want to take over the world!”

Sled Island Spotlight
Sounds Like BS
Show: Thursday, June 25 @ the Royal Canadian Legion — Upstairs at 10:30p.m.Website: www.soundslikebs.com

Though that goal may be somewhat ambitious for the full-time students, Busheikin and Searle are hoping their recently completed third album, appropriately titled 3, will help propel them onto bigger stages.
“We’ve sold our souls,” says Busheikin. “We’ll do anything for to get our music out there, we just want to push this thing as far as we can.”
“An unbelievable amount of our time goes into BS,” adds Searle. “A large part of our days — sometimes we have to do stuff for school, but most of the time BS takes precedence.”
As well it should if the guys are at all serious about making it — and they are. Searle and Busheikin created this latest album entirely by themselves, taking “an incredible amount of time mixing, recording, writing all the lyrics, mixing, mixing and mixing again …” Searle reminisces.
Their efforts culminated in the first album by Sounds Like BS with heavy lyrical content, a move away from their techno-instrumental sounds of their first two self-recorded discs.

Photo courtesy Sounds Like BS. The third album from Sounds Like BS, creatively dubbed 3, relies a great deal more on vocals then their previous work.

“We always had dreams to one day infuse vocals into the music,” says Searle, and “it was really just a matter of time before we actually sat down and created some lyrics,” Busheikin adds.
Despite wanting to add words to their franticly catchy, electro-rap beats, the duo freely admits their lyrics are hardly Shakespearean sonnets. Their verses tend to describe the girls at their shows, parties, girls they meet in daily life, the boyfriends they are stealing those girls from, the looks on the boyfriends’ faces while their girlfriends are being stolen, and chicks in general –— especially the ones without boyfriends.
“We do talk about lots of stuff from everyday life, because we want to give people a glimpse into a famous person’s life,” Searle deadpans.
“It’s really just shooting the shit in a basement, is what it’s like,” reflects Busheikin. “One time the two of us were walking to a friends’ house and we started throwing out verses, rhyming, and we came up with a song.”
Those simple and relatable lyrics will be on display during the Sled Island festival, where Sounds Like BS will perform twice for their hometown crowd, their first gigs away from the bright lights and smog of Toronto in a long time — “this is like a world tour for us,” jokes Busheikin. But through all the sarcasm and self-debasing, the BS guys really do long to make it big.
“A lot of it is just being in the right place at the right time,” says Busheikin. “Like the Black Eyed Peas, their lyrics are no better or worse than ours, but they caught a few breaks and got some bigwigs working for them and made it huge.”
“Pop-rap is a passion of ours,” adds Searle, “and it’s a lifestyle. We are really proud of this album because we worked so hard on it and put in so much effort from start to finish, we really do want to get out there and take over the world.”